We know, another PING... Good timing? Let's make it three days in a row 😜
Looking forward to getting feedback from the PH community.
We're around to questions and discussions all day from bonnie Scotland!
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@jamiesunderland Haha I was literally just thinking the same thing. I look forward to another Ping tomorrow :D Congrats with the product, really nice idea, well done!
@steerj92 I would be disappointed if there wasn't a product called PING.. tomorrow (runs to develop new product) 😂 Thanks for the upvote, keen to hear what you think!
Hello Product Hunt,
All companies, especially startups, need the oxygen of publicity to grow. But how can you get media attention without hiring a big PR agency? After 20 years of working in PR I’ve designed a simple writing tool so anyone can write press releases that will get published by journalists and bloggers.
My vision is to disrupt the way startups do PR by building a community, democratising the media and empowering entrepreneurs.
PingGo asks you the questions a journalist would. Then it takes your answers and puts them in order for you to edit and colleagues comment on. It helps you find and build one to one relationships with journalists. And finally, gets you planning your next press release.
Here are some of PingGo’s best bits:
Eight press release kits
Questions that create news value
Invite colleagues and partners to comment
Proof of approval and final version sign off
Build a personal contact book of journalists
Pitch your press release to your media contacts
Track your press release
Message journalists in real-time
Plan your next press release
Let's PingGo.....
@kleneway Thank you - fab words of support!! It's a really exciting day - would love to hear your feedback once you have had chance to play around with it.
Wow! This is great, and it actually works. A perfect way to get to the details journalists want/ need, while avoiding the pitfalls of promotional language that many use in their PRs.
Seriously good work. Now to build out the journalist/ contact database side of things, and it'll be the perfect platform. 🙌
@matt_aunger Brilliant! Thanks a lot Matt. You're right, many startups can get too carried about with their promotional language and not include the facts that journalists actually want.
We're building it and hope the community can help us too 🙌
@matt_aunger thanks matt - really appreciate the feedback. you're right - press releases are all about the facts. no puff no fluff. We'd like to see startups build their media lists slowly. Scattergun distributions just don't work. Give a journalist an exclusive and you stand much more chance of getting coverage. Lots on the dev pipeline to make that work!
@matt_aunger :o) it's a tricky one to get people to do/change behaviour - sometimes easier to just throw money at a newswire and hope for the best. this disruption lark - not as easy as it looks
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Wow, This is really useful. It would definitely save me a lot of time
@anesi_anesi thank you!! just wondering how you go about finding journalists right now? have you ever used PR news wires or would you be happy to try building strong relationships with individual journalists and media outlets. Might take longer but would get you better media coverage
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@sforsarah In the past, I would send out emails to a gazillion journalists without any real focus. Right now, I try to build relationships with media outlets. I have never tried PR news wires.
@anesi_anesi you're doing exactly the right thing - building relationship with the media outlet and the journalists that cover your beat will work so much better than emailing masses of randoms and hoping for the best! You are a perfect PingGo user! Let me know how you get on with PingGo's media contact book - it's there for you to record details of target journalists. Our aim is to make PingGo an efficient way for journalists to get news from startups. You can message journalists in real time and that will make it easier for them to arrange interviews and ask follow up questions. Thanks for this feedback. It validates our thinking for future developments.
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I've just been trying this for the last hour and a half and here are my findings:
Despite being in marketing for 15 years and having interviewed and worked with perhaps 40 or so PR companies from one-man bands to giants of the PR world, I'll admit, I never got 'it'. I don't know why, I just never did, and despite many attempts to gain knowledge from friends in PR, I could just never get a straight answer about what PR companies actually did. The more I asked, the more I got confused.
In the first 30 minutes or so of playing around with PingGo, I now feel I understand the mechanical side of PR - in terms of building a release, organising contacts, releasing at the right time etc etc...which has been a breath of fresh air, and now given me huge confidence to build my own PR campaigns.
I of course (now) know that I need to make friends with journalists, write great content that they would like and respect, and generally play the game of PR properly before I can become anywhere near a master, but this webapp, in terms of the way that it leads you to create a release based on a scenario, then to build a media contact list, and also the planner for various key dates has taught me how to go about it all purely in how it is laid out.
I know that this may sound like a planted review, such is my gushing, but this has generally changed my whole concept of how PR works in such a short time and I'm pretty happy about that. I would argue that's why the software was created in the first place - and makers, you have done exactly what you set out to do!
My best find on Product Hunt for a long time. Great work.
@jwelch what an amazing review! We've worked so so so hard to make this look so easy - and you are exactly why we did it. Thank you so much for taking the time to post. Genuinely touched. Thank you!
@stevenjmesser Hey Steve! How did you get on? Would love to hear your feedback!
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@sforsarah It's going quite well so far, the boilerplates are really working out for us! I've tried writing press releases in the past but always added too much information – PingGo has helped me cut down the waffle and focus on the pithy bits to grab a journo's attention. I've taken the questions PingGo asks and asked them to my team here. Once I've got their answers back, I'll be able to craft some decent sentences and plonk them into PingGo, creating a decent press release.
@stevenjmesser That is absolutely brilliant - so, so happy for you - exactly what we want to happen - startups get press on their own. Power to the Startup People. Can't tell you how happy I am to hear the words - IT TOTALLY WORKED.
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